Jocelyn Pook

Jocelyn Pook (born 14 February 1960, Birmingham, UK) is an English composer and viola player.

Biography

Jocelyn Pook’s distinctive style is a product of her diverse experiences in classical, commercial and world music. After graduating from London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, she performed with many pop artists including The Communards and Massive Attack, and formed Electra Strings for whom she wrote original material. She has worked extensively with eminent dance companies such as DV8 and Shobana Jeyasingh, and in 2002 she was commissioned by the BBC Proms to write a work for The King’s Singers in collaboration with Poet Laureate Andrew Motion. Notable film credits include Michael Radford’s adaptation of The Merchant of Venice and Stanley Kubrick’s final film Eyes Wide Shut.

As one of the "Leytonstone Contingent," Pook recorded on two occasions with pianist Jeremy Peyton Jones for Rough Trade and later for Century XXI. About a year later, she joined Anne Stephenson and Audrey Riley to accompany Virginia Astley both on stage and record. Session work followed and alternated with her co-founding of the Electra Strings with Australian violinist Sonia Slany and an album on the Village Life label. This neoclassical chamber quartet later transformed into the Brilliant Strings after she and Slany had gone their separate ways.

Pook also has a separate career as a film composer. By the end of the decade, she had made three albums in her own right; the first was Deluge. She went international with her music for Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, to which she contributed among other things a spare reworking of an excerpt from Ligeti's 'Musica Ricercata II' and the music for the masked ball sequence, which incorporates a fragment of an Orthodox mass played backwards and lyrics sung (or chanted) in Romanian. Recently, she also contributed the score to the 2004 film version of William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and Peter Kosminsky's film on David Kelly, The Government Inspector. She also composed the soundtrack for the film "L'Emploi du Temps", or "Out of Time". Her solo album Deluge was released in 1997.

In 1983 she appeared in the ABC movie Mantrap as one of many string players for the album The Lexicon Of Love Most of her sessions were for Indie bands throughout the 80s.

Career highlights

• 1997 - Blow the Wind: Pie Jesu, used by Orange in TV advertising campaign.
• 1999 - score for Eyes Wide Shut nominated for Golden Globe Award.
• 2001 - wrote score for Laurent Cantet’s film ''L’emploi du temps''.
• 2002 - Phantasmaton premiered by the Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company.
• 2003 - Multimedia Award for Speaking in Tunes at the first British Composer Awards.
• 2004 - wrote score for Michael Radford’s filma daptation of The Merchant of Venice.

Key works

• Blow the Wind: Pie Jesu (1994; mezzo-soprano,string quartet, tape)
• Portraits in Absentia (1999; answerphonemessage samples, orchestra)
• Eyes Wide Shut (1999; film score)
• Saints and Sinners (2000; Persian singer, chorus,ensemble)
• L’emploi du temps (2001; film score)
• Speaking in Tunes (2002; string quartet, tape)

Selected recordings

• Deluge - Venture CDVE 933
• Untold Things - Real World CDRW93
• The Merchant of Venice soundtrack - Decca 475 6367

External links

• Official website
• Jocelyn Pook's homepage at Chester Music